As computing and information systems evolve from a central mainframe environment to a client/server arrangement, the bandwidth demands to accomplish the communication between the network for client nodes and the server node(s) has increased dramatically. The dawn of the World Wide Web, has brought about a tremendous increase in file types which are no longer restricted to just ASCII alphanumerical data. Now with audio, video, and graphical file formats being routinely sent, the demand for increasing bandwidth is growing exponentially each year. To help meet this increasing bandwidth demand, network providers are converting from an electrical network to optical networks. It has been shown that optical networks today can reach bandwidth in the Gigabit range and one can expect future technologies to allow bandwidth even in the Terabit ranges.
This increase in bandwidth presents a challenge for continuous real-time storage of information. The highest continuous real-time storage available with the best technology today is through the use of high-speed silicon devices such as Rambus Dynamic Random Access Memory (RDRAM) and Complex Programmable Logic Devices (CPLD). CPLD and RDRAM devices have processing and storage speeds of 2.8 Gigabits per second. This current technology can handle bandwidths up to the OC-48 level of optical networks, which is 2.5 Gigabits per second. However, today's optical networks are providing bandwidths at the OC-192 level or 10 Gigabits per second. Furthermore, optical networks operating at the OC-768 level or 40 Gigabits per second are near reality. Clearly, the gap between what silicon devices can handle electrically and the bandwidth offered by present day optical networks is widening by several factor each year. To meet the challenge of continuous real-time storage of information provided by these optical networks, new devices need to be developed that can store optical information in an optical form.